In 2012, the Irish author Colum McCann and a group of fellow writers hit on an idea. They were at a festival in the US, and it started with a challenge they set themselves: “What is the highest aim of storytelling, and how can we harness that energy to transform our society?” They believed the stories they told had power – writers are not short of confidence – but could they change the world? McCann believed they could. Art for society’s sake.

What emerged from that was an organisation called Narrative 4, which puts a story exchange between disparate, sometimes antagonistic groups at its heart. You pair up, swap stories from one another’s lives and then tell each other’s story back to the group in the first person. The theory is that telling someone else’s story will give you what McCann, who heads the organisation with co-founder Lisa Consiglio, calls “radical empathy”. For that moment, you become the other, possibly an “other” to whom you had previously been hostile.

The weekend is coordinated by Ruth Gilligan, a novelist who was born in Dublin, lives in London and teaches creative writing at the University of Birmingham; British author David Savill; and Narrative 4’s regional director, James Lawlor, who keeps a gently watchful eye over proceedings. The theme is loosely “identity”, with Brexit as the inevitable background, but it quickly becomes apparent that teenagers live such intense, angsty lives that the tales they tell could go anywhere.

That unpredictability is clear when the students are asked to write what they are curious about on a sheet of paper pinned to the wall. The organisers perhaps expect Anglo-Irish relations, Trump, nationalism – monochrome adult subjects. But the themes raised are truly technicolour: “Are there aliens?” “Is there a God?” “What happens after death?” “What language do people who are deaf since birth think in?” “Why doesn’t the hotel I’m staying in have Cadbury’s chocolate?” How can Brexit compete with these great existential questions?

Gilligan and Savill explain to the group how to shape a story, and give them a quick guide to Irish and English history, and to some of the hostilities aroused by Brexit. But in the story-swap session, there are far deeper issues in play: loss, grief, the pressures put on teenagers, their urge to conform, the masks they have to wear to survive, their struggle to find themselves.

They take the story exchange very seriously and respect each other completely, feeling the responsibility of telling their partner’s story. They then sit in a circle and tell their tales, one after another, with no applause or discussion until the end. It takes more than an hour, in which a lot of tears are shed, despite the competition from jolly seasonal music outside (it’s turning-on-the-Christmas-lights day in Limerick). Gilligan had supplied a small packet of tissues for the group I observe, but this turns into a packet-and-a-half session, surprising even her.

It turns out that teenagers, on both sides of the Irish Sea, face many problems: there are stories of bullying, self-harm, eating disorders. The difficulties faced by the girls of Asian heritage in Birmingham, torn between a conservative community and a wider secular society, are the most severe. While the boys can lose themselves in sport, the girls experience the full force of cultural collision. The Limerick students, who are being taught in Irish and given a deep understanding of the country’s culture, seem more rooted, less challenged by conflicting identities, though still in some cases struggling with loss and questions of identity in the broadest sense. Who are they, why are they here, where does their Instagram self meet their real self?

“It’s great to find you are not alone,” says one of the students, summing up the mood perfectly. “Life is unpredictable,” he adds – and at that moment, a drum roll suddenly booms out from the Christmas sound system in the street. Here are their conversations.

Emily and Kishan

Emily is a superconfident teenager who can’t stop laughing. She wants to be a pilot, and you can tell she’ll make it. Her story – about having an English mother and an Irish father, and being bullied at school because of it – touched on the key theme of the weekend: identity and the way you navigate it. “I struggle to fit in,” she tells me, “to find a place where I belong.”

That gives her an immediate bond with Kishan, who was born in the UK to parents of Indian heritage. Both speak two languages: English and Irish in Emily’s case; English and Gujarati in Kishan’s. Kishan opted for a jokey, sporty story about feeling cheated out of a trophy he thought his team deserved to win, but now says he wishes he’d been braver and told a more personal one. Perhaps about his religion and culture, which he fears are being chipped away. “I feel I’m British,” he says. “But I don’t want to forget that I’m Indian.”

He says the weekend will leave its mark: “I thought it would just be like another school trip, but there was a lot more emotional depth.” In Emily, he has found an ideal match. “We talked for ages,” he says. “I think we talk fast.” “You find things in common,” Emily says. “But also things that were different,” Kishan adds. He means that growing up and going to school in Handsworth, a predominantly black and Asian area in north-west Birmingham, he didn’t have much trouble fitting in. As he talks, though, it emerges that he works at McDonald’s and customers regularly make racist remarks to him, which he never reports. “They’re usually drunk and I ignore them,” he explains, “or just don’t serve them.” Or spit in the burger, I suggest. Emily laughs again, pleased by the idea of revenge served with added relish.

Isobel chose the only explicitly Brexit-related story of the weekend. “I’ve always been proud of being a citizen of Europe,” she says, “and I feel some people who are really small-minded have taken that away from me. I had no say in the matter, and my future is being decided by someone else.”

Halesowen, the old industrial town in which she lives, voted to leave the EU. “There are a lot of older people there,” she says. “Not many young people. It’s quite a forgotten place in a way.” She says the sense of being ignored and left behind led to people scapegoating Europe. Her plan is to study German at university, and move to Germany if she can. One day she may even get her EU citizenship back. Inspired by her father’s interest, she says she loves Germanic culture and has enjoyed travelling there.

Emer, whose own story was a more personal one about the family home being burgled and feeling insecure as a result, says she hadn’t given the impact of Brexit much thought until she related Isobel’s story. “Reading it out made it feel as if it [Brexit] did affect me. It was literally stepping into her shoes, and I felt all the emotions she felt. It was so powerful.”

Emer and Isobel clearly get on well – Emer already calls her new friend Izzy. “We found we could relate to each other,” Emer says of the story-swap group. “People go through things like loss and grief, and they all poured out.”

“Going to school,” adds Isobel, “it’s easy to lose faith in your contemporaries and just think, ‘We have nothing linking us’, because some people aren’t very nice. There is so much division between teenagers, between the different social groups. It was so nice to be in a room with people who didn’t care about all that, who were going to tell their story anyway.”

Clementine and Mercy

Clementine (on left) and Mercy: ‘When you meet people, you’re not aware of what they’ve been through.’ Photograph: Cliona O’Flaherty for the Guardian

Just before the story-swap session, the participants were asked to write down something they were nervous about. Clem refused to write anything. “I’m not nervous,” she insisted. So it came as a surprise that her rendition of Mercy’s story was one of the weepiest of them all.

At some point in the telling, the contrast between their stories struck Clem. Her tale, as told unflinchingly by Mercy, was of loving cricket from a very young age and excelling at it. Mercy’s story, as recounted by Clem, involved being born with brittle bone disease, feeling restricted and patronised all her life, having to use a wheelchair much of the time and then finding a voice, in every sense, when she started singing in a choir. Little wonder Clem found it so overwhelming.

Born to a Nigerian mother who came to Ireland three years before she was born, Mercy speaks Yoruba to her mother, but has chosen to be educated in Irish. I ask whether she feels Irish or Nigerian. “Both,” she says, explaining that Ireland has been generally welcoming. She plans to go to university in Ireland and become a human rights lawyer.

Clem says she’s enjoyed the weekend, but has never experienced anything quite as challenging. “Everyone else had been through a lot,” she says, “and I felt that I hadn’t really.” I assure her that’s a good thing – suffering is not a competition. But “When you meet people, you’re not aware of what they’ve been through,” she says. The amount of pain came as a shock to her; the depth of her response to it, too.

Danielle and Sameer

Danielle and Sameer: ‘When my brother died, it was like, whoa, my world has changed.’ Photograph: Cliona O’Flaherty for the Guardian’

Sameer’s story, as related by Danielle, was one of the most moving of all, and concerned the death of his elder brother in a road accident. “This is the story that defined my life,” Sameer said in the account he gave Danielle. Danielle’s was also a sad tale – about her grandfather’s death and the anxiety attacks that followed. But she had fought back. “I’m a soldier,” she said – or, rather, Sameer said for her – “and I will not give up.”

“We’ve gone through similar experiences, even though we are so different,” Sameer says. “[When my brother died,] it was like, whoa, my world has changed and I’ll have to develop on my own. I didn’t have that role model any more.” He has rarely spoken about it before. “I’m not the type to open up,” he says. Sameer is an athlete and a wannabe footballer on the books of the Aston Villa academy, part of a world in which it doesn’t pay to show weakness. Danielle says she found it hard to tell his story. “It was a big responsibility,” she says. “I choked up halfway through, but I said, no, don’t, just come back, and I kept going.’”

Danielle and her sister are both at Limerick’s Irish school, even though her parents are non-Irish speakers. It makes for an intriguing home life – the sisters speaking to each other in Irish (sometimes useful, she says) and to their parents in English. Sameer’s parents are of Pakistani heritage, but his grandparents live in Russia and he was born in Holland. He grew up in Lowestoft and says he was the only “brown kid” in the class, picked on for his colour and because he couldn’t speak English. His family have lived in Birmingham since 2013. He seems relaxed and confident, and is perhaps a little overwhelming for Danielle, who has a natural quietness and reserve. But their battles unite them. “We are very different,” she says, “but also very alike.”

Farzana and Muireann

Farzana (on left) and Muireann: ‘I feel like I have found myself.’ Photograph: Cliona O’Flaherty for the Guardian

Farzana told the group, through her storyteller Muireann, that she had a tough time as an adolescent. She wanted to please her parents, her school, her friends. “I now know I’m never going to be perfect,” she says. “It’s been a struggle, but I’m getting through it. You have to find a balance. Over the years, I feel like I have found myself. I know what I like, I know what I don’t like, I know who I am.”

She speaks Bengali at home. “Parts of me feel more British than Bengali,” she says, “but when I’m around my family, I feel more Bengali.” She was born in Bangladesh, but came to the UK when she was six months old and has spent all her life here.

Muireann’s story was about being a fashion victim. She loves clothes, but disliked the way people were making her choose between fashion and study, as if a young woman couldn’t possibly be both fashion-conscious and academic. “There was pressure on me to be one or the other,” she says. “I wanted to be whatever I wanted to be, as many things as I wanted to be.”

Her Irishness and the Irish language are at the heart of her identity. Unlike many at her school, hers is an Irish-speaking household. “I speak Irish to my father all the time,” she says. Her mother can speak Irish but less fluently, and Muireann usually speaks to her in English. And when they are all together? “It depends,” she says. “If we are in school mode, we will speak Irish.”

Muireann’s grandfather passed Irish on to her father as his first language – hence his fluency – and she will continue the line. “By speaking it, we are keeping the language alive,” she says. “If we don’t speak it, it’s going to die. I’m a proud Irish person and it’s crucial to my identity. I will speak Irish to my own kids. I’m determined to do that. I’m going to keep it alive, even if it’s just for them.”

Aaron and Kadeja

Aaron and Kadeja: ‘Being attacked was an important part of my life.’ Photograph: Cliona O’Flaherty for the Guardian

Aaron and Kadeja both conjured up powerful stories: his about being physically attacked by a boy who had once been his friend; hers about having a sister who she discovered, at the age of eight, was really her cousin.

“Being attacked was an important part of my life,” Aaron says. “Coming out of it made me a stronger person.” It was never clear why his friend attacked him – it may have been some sort of gang initiation, a demonstration of newfound toughness. “I was very confused about why he did it.”

Kadeja says she found telling Aaron’s story very affecting. “I don’t even remember reading it or saying the words,” she says. “I just became him and I felt really emotional.” Her own story was equally strong. “I chose it because it’s about thinking you are someone, then losing your identity and trying to recover from it. You start questioning a lot of things and get confused.”

Confusion is the lot of the teenager. “You are trying to find yourself, you put pressure on yourself, but then there is pressure in external places,” Kadeja says. She wants to be a writer; her ambitious, Bangladeshi-born parents want her to be a doctor. Her father is a taxi driver and is determined to see his daughter rise in the world. I ask her who will win the occupational battle. “I will,” she says.

Aaron and Kadeja have an easy rapport. Kadeja says she has come to embrace her Bangladeshi heritage as she’s got older, while Aaron is proud of his Irish identity. “People from other countries tend to see the Irish stereotype,” he complains. “We’re all alcoholics, ginger hair, leprechauns – and that’s irritating at times. It’s how Americans view us.” There is some truth to every stereotype, he says, but there are more interesting stories about modern Ireland lurking under the Blarney Stone.

“I thought it would be awkward,” Hadiqa says when I ask what she expected of the weekend. “But as soon as we started talking, it was OK.” Her story was a powerful one – of being criticised when she returned to visit her extended family in Pakistan for not wearing the hijab, and then labelled a hypocrite for wearing it when she came back to Birmingham. She felt she just couldn’t win.

“I’m a person with morals and values,” she says. “I will take a stand on them any time. But the way they were questioning my moral values [in Pakistan] offended me. It confused me and I didn’t know what to do.” Now she doesn’t wear the hijab and seems content with her choice. “I’m more comfortable with practising my religion at home in private rather than in public. I don’t want to be judged.”

Eva says Hadiqa is “one of first Muslim people I’ve spoken to – it’s been a great learning experience for me. As I told her story, I became very emotional.”

Hadiqa also had a learning experience. Eva’s story had been about Limerick winning the all-Ireland hurling tournament this year – for the first time since 1973. Hurling is a religion in Limerick – there is a statue of two hurlers in the high street – and this was a very big deal. It was even bigger for Eva, because her mother – a fan of the sport – was born in 1973 and has been waiting for this triumph all her life. Eva had shown Hadiqa a hurling DVD, and I ask Hadiqa if she now understands the sport and its quasi-religious status in this small, tightly-knit community. She rolls her eyes and looked perplexed. There are some gulfs that can’t be bridged.

Simrat and Marcus

Simrat and Marcus: ‘I learned a lot about empathy.’ Photograph: Cliona O’Flaherty for the Guardian

“I’ve really enjoyed it,” says Marcus when I ask what he’s made of meeting the group from the Midlands, before wondering why he’s used a Northern Irish accent to answer my question. He is the group’s comic surrealist; his story concerned a terrible year he’d had in which he developed a Nicolas Cage obsession to steer him through. He is one of only two boys among the 15-strong contingent from Gaelcholáiste Luimnigh. He reckons all the other boys at the school are spending the weekend obsessing about sport. In Marcus’s world, sport comes a distant second to box sets, preferably starring Nicholas Cage.

Simrat is from an Indian background, is a practising Sikh and chooses to wear a turban. “It used to be that only men could wear it,” she says, “but women can wear it as well now. That’s a breakthrough in terms of our cultural tradition; we’ve struck a blow for equality.”

She is living proof that you can be true to your traditional religion and a representative of radical change. “I wear it to show that I’m not afraid of my background and where my parents are from,” she says. “I’m proud of it and it’s part of me.” She says she has occasionally experienced racism, but ignores it. “My faith is bigger than their derogatory comments.”

Her story, as told by an emotionally charged Marcus, is about an upset within the family that led to a relative being bullied. Simrat found it hard to deal with and initially raged at God, but gradually made peace with her religion.

She says she found the story exchange “profound”. “I learned a lot about people,” she says, “and about empathy. I see no difference between English teenagers and Irish teenagers. We all go through the same struggle.”

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